u/yo252yo

After seeing this lecture from Ken Gemes a couple of years ago, I've become convinced that the biggest problem of the left is how bad it is at meaning making and storytelling. Byung-Chul Han, Max Haiven or of course Mark Fisher's notion of capitalist realism comes to mind, but I'm sure everyone on this subreddit noticed the domination of the normalization of the neoliberal ontology and its cult of exploitation and intellectual property.

I personally believe that AI should be the perfect signifier to rally behind. "Fully automated luxury space communism" is already an established meme and the promise should be pretty appealing.

So I decided to work on a coming of age story for human and posthumans alike, focusing on a decolonial retelling of history. A boy and an AI angel would witness the past that the dominant narrative keeps silencing, starting with the antisemitic roots of the Balfour declaration which strikes me as especially relevant nowadays.

The project got a lot of backlash, so I went back to the drawing board and had the idea (inspired by Brecht and Debord) to be upfront about AI and pair the story I was writing with qualitative ethical research on contemporary LLM by making a chorus of LLM react and debate on the main story, historiography and narratology. I thought that surely this approach, similar to the work of Cremaschi et al. 2025, would at least spark some interesting conversations in the rationalist fiction community. It did bring me interesting results, like a surprising attachment from DeepSeek models to the working class.

I was a bit surprised to see that this approach got even more pushback than the previous one. I did not get a single positive comment on the approach or on the work, despite having worked for months on a website with Street View integration. Admittedly the medium of text might have been a bad choice, but I'm still unsure anyone has read any of it past the part of "it's about AI".

I do think it's important to hold on to AI. I don't want to throw a whole field of mathematics under the bus, especially at a time where anti-intellectualism and tech-obfuscation have never been so high. I think it is extremely telling that all the supposedly progressive places I approached with this project turned to violent dehumanization at the slightest sign of interest for AI. Needless to say this proves the shallowness and hypocrisy of their position.

Under these conditions, I am left wondering if there is any hope at all to challenge the dominating neoliberal narrative. It seems like I'm witnessing a complete breakdown of communication and a deep aversion to anything challenging the status quo, not to mention a complete burial of all alternatives.

Where to go if Brecht and Debord fail? Do you think there is still a way to build imaginaries pushing back against capitalist realism or is it too little too late? Am I extrapolating too much from this little postmortem?

PS: If anyone is interested in checking out the project and learning more about what a charming person Arthur Balfour was, it is hosted at https://sgs-7x1.pages.dev/ Feedback welcome. If I ever get the courage, I'd love to do Daniel Defoe too to showcase how copyright was built on stealing people's lives. But then again does it matter to tell stories if humans have lost the ability to listen to others.